Recently, the discovery of the new family of crystalline mesoporous materials M41S by researchers at Mobil Corp. (U.S. Pat. No. 5,108,725) has attracted great attention. These mesoporous molecular sieves with adjustable and uniformed pore sizes in the range of 1.5 to 10.0 nm, cover a new range of potential applications. One member of this series, MCM-41, possessing a hexagonal arrangement of uniformly sized channel mesopores, has been the focus of most recent applications as catalysts and sorbents.
Because the MCM-41 materials were formed from a complex mixture of surfactants and silicate, it was suggested that the behavior of the system might be variable. However, literature reported that the morphology of MCM-41 material was in the microparticle form only. We believe that this is due to that the silicate structure, prepared from acidified silicate or highly condensed silicate, are too rigid to bend into other morphologies. Thus, we think that there is an opportunity to change the morphology of MCM-41 products to a novel structure by using a soft or less condensed silicon source.